SSE/Participants

Sarah Abrams*
Affiliations: Good Samaritan General Hospital; La Romana, Dominican Republic; Clark University

Before Sarah began college, she volunteered for six months at the Good Samaritan General Hospital, La Romana, Dominican Republic. The Hospital provides health services and education to families who have no other access to healthcare.

During her freshman year (2007) at Clark University in Worcester, MA, Sarah received a summer research grant which took her back to La Romana to conduct research on Haitian-Dominican children. She focused particularly on their goals and plans for the future versus the reality of their situation of statelessness and impoverishment. Much of her work since 2007 has been promoting ongoing public health advocacy initiatives with Haitian-Dominican immigrant families. She has also started an English language program in a sugar plantation batey in collaboration with the Good Samaritan Hospital. Sarah has led several volunteer groups of Massachusetts area students who come to the DR and aid in distributing information about medical services and take part in community service clean-up projects.

Currently, with a grant provided by the Compton Mentor Fellowship program, she is working with the hospital to establish a water filtration project in the bateyes. A primary goal for Sarah is to help promote financial independence and sustainability for the hospital and to see the hospital become a central organization for self-sustaining offshoot projects such as schools, literacy programs, food coops, and other small businesses.

Edward Cheung and John Molina
Affiliation: Santiago, Dominican Republic; Sustainable Community Development Project (SCDP); Brown University Medical School

In 2006, Edward (Ed) went to the Dominican Republic and volunteered with A Mother's Wish Foundation, a U.S.-based non-profit organization that operates a medical clinic (Pequeños Pasitos) in five rural communities just outside Santiago. As the son of a Colombian immigrant, John quickly developed an interest in the DR after going there as a short-term volunteer for several months in 2006. John and Ed decided to work together to carry out a house-to-house survey of medical needs among Santiago's poorest residents. They followed the survey with development in 2007 of their social entrepreneurship, Sustainable Community Development Project (SCDP).

Within SCDP, they began planning how they might bring community development interests into a framework for sustainability, when so much of their work depends on volunteers from US colleges and universities. SCDP is now regrouping to center on the core values of preventive healthcare, community ownership, bi-directional experiential learning, and youth empowerment. In January 2008, SCDP brought its first group of twelve Brown University students and a pediatrician to the D.R. In the summer of 2008, another fifteen Brown students and seven Brown University Medical School students worked for eight weeks to try to create a sustainable future for the program. Ed and John are looking to expand their programming to include sex education, a literacy campaign, community gardens, summer school, and computer courses. Ed and John face core challenges for the SE organization: local motivation, appropriate infrastructure, and sustainability planning.

Sara Choi*
Affiliation: DR Schools Project; El Mogote Elementary, located on the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic; Harvard University

Sara is the founder and President of the Dominican Republic Schools Project and El Mogote Elementary School on the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Sara began her work after an extended stay in the Dominican Republic where she learned of the human rights violations occurring along the border. Most obvious among these violations are the exploitation of sharecroppers (generally Haitian immigrants) and the denial to their children of birth certificates (thus disenfranchising the young from public school education).

Believing in education as a vehicle of social change, Sara started El Mogote Elementary which opened in 2006 to offer education to children of Haitian immigrants. Funding for the building, desks, and teacher comes from the local government, but most of the work for the organization has been done by Sara and her partner, a Harvard University Teaching Fellow, who has worked extensively in the area. Since its beginning, the DR Schools Project has also built a school latrine, taken infants and children to the hospital for vaccinations, and made preparations for a school library. The organization welcomes college volunteers who collect information and help in construction and education projects. Future plans include hiring more teachers, creating a system of public transportation, and improving communication with local NGOs, human rights groups, and individual community advocates for human rights.

Tyler Gage
Affiliation: Peruvian Amazon; Center for Shamanic Education and Exchange (CSEE); Cushi Panga, Inc.; Runa, LLC, Brown University

In the winter of 2005, Tyler worked as writing assistant to Jonathon Miller, founder of Grupo Osanimi, an organization that works on rainforest conservation and cultural heritage projects in Ecuador and Costa Rica. Subsequent travels to Peru introduced him to two shamans, Herlinda and Enrique, who sparked his involvement with the Center for Shamanic Education and Exchange (CSEE), a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of shamanic wisdom, cultural practices, and traditional ways of indigenous peoples worldwide. In August 2007, Tyler organized and co-facilitated a retreat in Santa Fe, New Mexico for college students as an introduction to shamanic practice by Jose Stevens, PhD, founder of CSEE. During the summer of 2007, Tyler worked with his partner Dahmay Shiday to create Cushi Panga Inc., an organic, fair trade guayusa tea cooperative. Guayusa is a plant revered by indigenous people for its tonifying properties and ability to heal stomach and liver ailments.

Following the September 2008 SSE seminar retreat at Brown University, Tyler worked with several peers from Brown to found Runa, a fair-trade tea company based in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In the winter of 2009, Tyler began work in Ecuador to solidify Runa's partnerships and contracts with the indigenous cooperatives and to standardize quality control and production process.